


Shape of a Family

by Assimbya



Category: Xenogenesis Series - Octavia E. Butler
Genre: Other, Polyamory, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 09:08:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8885107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Assimbya/pseuds/Assimbya
Summary: Jesusa tries to work out what her new life will mean for her.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Marien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marien/gifts).



> Dear recipient - thank you so much for your prompt. It was an exciting challenge to try and engage with Butler's rich and complicated work, and I hope I've been able to provide a little bit of the glimpse of these characters' lives that you were wishing for!
> 
> Content note: the Jesusa/Jodahs/Tomas relationship has some inherent incest dynamics; that's not focused on here, but it is present. Also, there's a lot of discussion of questions of choice and consent, but nothing beyond the canon content.

As the town grew, Jesusa could not stop marveling at it - its smooth pliability beneath her hands, the changeability of its surface. Some of the others of her people had difficulty believing it to be a living thing, but Jesusa never did. She knew the town as something planted by Jodahs, created by it just as it would create their own shared children one day, and because of that she could not stop feeling love or wonder. This was her home now, she thought with surety. This was the place where she would raise her family.

Others still refused to leave what had been their old settlement, distrusting the alien creation, not quite plant and not quite animal, that they had been told would be their future. It was one of many sites of tension among them. The harmony that they had there now was hard-won, and not simple. Jesusa felt, at times, as though it could shatter at any moment. She did not think Jodahs understood that. Jodahs understood humans better than ooloi ever had, but it did not understand the fear its people caused hers, and which even Jodahs’ influence could not entirely eradicate. Jodahs could make humans love it, trust it - but this did not mean loving their occupation by the Oankali, loving their loss of control over the future of their species.

(They could remember, as she could, the terrors of what their life had been before, closed spaces and forced childbearing and the precarity of survival in the mountains. They could feel the weight of being all that stood between humanity and the demonic. Jesusa could remember it too, kneeling before the crucifix, being taught the meaning of her name, being lectured about the obligation contained in the fact of her own fertility. She reminded the others of that life, when they became too restless, when rumors about rebellion began to resurface. It was not a kind thing to do. Tomas, gentler than she, worried about that. But Jesusa loved her people, despite the harm they had done to her, and loving them also meant fighting for their survival, even if the methods were ugly. If they fought the Oankali now, not simply through refusal to mate with them but through outright attempts on individual’s lives, Jesusa did not believe that they would survive. Not with their consciousness and autonomy intact. Not with any chance of a life which they could experience as meaningful.)

But the town was growing, and Jesusa felt her joy burgeon and settle in her bones with each passing day. She had a house, shared only with Tomas and Jodahs, with smooth walls that yielded to her touch and reminded her of Jodahs’ own skin. She had food enough to eat, and work to do, in setting up the town and guiding its inhabitants, that did not wear her body down to nothing. She had her own smooth skin, and a certainty of continued health and youth and life. She had the pleasure of lying down each night with Jodahs, with Tomas on its other side, and feeling the closeness, the mingling with them both that she could not before have imagined. She could do this, she thought. Even the parts that were ugly and hard and made her struggle with her own sense of what was good and right; even those she could live with.

-

“But how will we know they’re the right ones?”

“I will know. You both will know through me.”

They were, all three of them, discussing the arrival of Jodahs’ potential Oankali mates. It was a conversation they had many times before, so many that they started to blur together in Jesusa’s mind. But the conversation topic was becoming more real, and more imminent. Word had come - a match had been identified, a pair were interested. They were on their way.

“You haven’t met them,” Tomas objected, “you don’t know what kind of people they are, or what kind of parents they will be.”

“When I met both of you I knew. And I hadn’t ever spoken to you before.”

“That’s different.” Jesusa did not quite interrupt Jodahs, but she could hear her voice sharp in a way it rarely was. “You traveled with us. You learned what we were fleeing, and what we had survived. We chose to stay with you through your metamorphosis - you saw that in us. We knew each other.”

Jodahs’ tentacles fluttered momentarily; Jesusa could not tell whether it was in consideration or distress. “That isn’t quite true. From the moment I met you both I knew I wanted you as my mates.”

There was silence for a moment, a breath within the privacy of their little home. Jesusa waited for Tomas to speak and, when he didn’t, spoke again herself. “Yes. You were desperate. I know that, you’ve told us how you were dissolving - we saw Aaor go through that. But surely it wasn’t that simple. There are human stories about love at first sight, but I can’t imagine -”

“No, Jesusita, listen to Jodahs,” Tomas’ tone was steady and slow, as if he was considering something, “that’s exactly what its saying. It was love at first sight - I was the first one who met it, not you, and from the moment it met me it wanted to heal me, it began giving me that love and care. That’s who Jodahs is, that’s what it does.” Tomas reached out to place a hand on one of Jodahs’ sensory arms, and Jesusa felt a melting in her as she regarded both of them. “I’m worried about our Oankali mates too. The commitment is so big. But I believe Jodahs when it says it will know whether it can love them from that first moment.”

Jesusa, too, reached out her hand for Jodahs - she felt its warmth, and through it, Tomas’. “I know that. Maybe it’s more ourselves that we’re both worried about,” she caught herself laughing, half instinctively, half trying to dispel the tension she felt, that even Jodahs may have absorbed. “Jodahs, you can get along with anyone, we know that. The hardest resisters fall in love with you, and you with them. You’re adaptable, it’s in your nature. But I’m not, at least not that way. And Tomas isn’t the way you are either. We have our ways, our habits; having anyone new join our household, Oankali or human, would make us worry and ask questions. And, like Tomas said - we will be having children with these people. We’re accepting their genetic material into ourselves. Surely you can understand that, Jodahs?”

She could feel Jodahs reciprocating the energy she gave to it, sending her reassurance, though not so much as to end the argument by simply feeding her its own unadulterated excitement for the new mates. “I do understand. Or I think I do. I am human too, but as an ooloi I see the beauty and potential in all humans and all Oankali. To use Tomas’ words - I do fall in love easily. But these mates aren’t random. You know that. They were approved by my ooan grandparents, who are wise in these things. Kahguyaht reviewed their genetic material and temperaments, and determined them an appropriate match. They are Dinso like me - they have been born for the trade, for newness and experimentation with humans.”

Jesusa and Tomas met one another’s gaze and she knew they were thinking the same thing, could feel the echo of her brother’s hesitance which so mirrored her own. She spoke. “I think - in too many ways that reminds us of what the elders here would do. Making matches and saying who should have children with who. Putting a couple together simply because they looked the least likely to bear children.”

Jodahs’ tentacles fluttered again, but otherwise it was still. For an instance Jesusa felt guilty for having distressed it; she felt often as if was much more innocent than she, and in need of her protection. She always remembered it during its second metamorphosis, helpless and desperate for her. “It’s not the same.”

“Of course it isn’t the same. You and Nikanj and Kahguyaht can review all our genetic material with a specificity that our elders could never have imagined. I don’t doubt that you will be able to make beautiful children for us. But we still don’t have a choice.”

“The potential mates who are coming, they are choosing to. Our family is the first of its kind on earth, Chka. No unmated Oankali would ever be thrown into it without expressing desire and ability to take on the challenges of our life here. It’s not the life you were afraid of, having child after child in fear and constraint. I promise that.”

“I know.” Jesusa softened. “You’ve wanted this for so long.”

She felt Jodahs’ sensory tentacle, then, on the back of her neck, and relaxed. “You have too.”

“Hey,” Tomas said, drawing their attention, and then he too was enfolded in their shared embrace. “We all want children, Jodahs. We might not feel as incomplete as you do, but we all want it. We’ve been waiting for this, we just want it to go as well as possible.”

“I know that,” Jodahs answered, “and I know also you won’t love them as first as I will. I’ve talked with Nikanj about that, how I’ll be the bridge between you in the beginning. And maybe you’re right, Jesusa - you both did choose to stay with me. There were other humans I met before that, who I felt so much desire to have as mates, but they didn’t stay. They were drawn, to me, but they pulled away. You didn’t. I think we can share that, what we have together. I think we can do it again.”

For a flash, almost faster than she could consciously register it, Jesusa felt resentment, felt like protesting that they hadn’t chosen, not fully, not with all the information, they didn’t know it would mean their lives, they didn’t know that they couldn’t choose to leave once they had stayed. But then it was gone. She kept those feelings far away, now. They hurt Jodahs too much, and they didn’t help any of them. There was no such thing as resolution for that anger, and nothing to do except to hold it as truth alongside the equally powerful truth that this was the way the world worked now, that Jodahs had done what it had done to survive.

(What values would she one day teach her sons, her daughters, her ooloi children, as she herself tried to hold to both human and Oankali? What would she tell them about morality? Would she teach them to put autonomy and honesty first, to listen to people’s words and respect their wishes? Would she teach them to put the well-being of the future first, to look for consensus, to tell lies of omission when needed to save their lives, to listen first to people’s hearts even over their words? What would her children, second-generation constructs, think about good and evil?)

But what she said was: “We will be ready. We will follow you, when they arrive. We will work at loving them.”

She wished, as she often did, that she could reach for Tomas, complete their circle, but she could feel him through Jodahs, and that had to be enough. 

“We love you,” Tomas said then, “we will love who you love.”

-

When they stepped from the shuttle, Jesusa found herself, despite her best intentions, feeling disappointment. They looked like any other male and female Oankali. There was no spark of recognition, no moment of joy. She had known that this would come later, once Jodahs had already made its connections and begun the true process of mating, but she could not help feeling a sense of anti-climax.

But this was the way life was, though. It wasn’t always the drama of striking a foreign being with an arrow and then falling in love with it. Sometimes it was knowing that you want harmony and peace and parents for children and doing what you needed to do. The love would follow. The love could follow.

Jesusa opened her palms and held them out to the female Oankali, who would be her wife, who would be a second mother to her children. “Welcome to our family,” she said.


End file.
